School headmaster Hüseyin Çömlek, deputy headmaster Mehmet Semerci, and Mehmet Göktas, the head of the foundation that built the dormitory, the Balcilar Town Foundation for Aid to School and Course Students, are being held in Konya prison, near the village of Balcilar, where the dormitory was located.

The head of the local Civil Engineers Chamber, Ugur Ibrahim Altalay, told the Associated Press that the dormitory that collapsed Friday was unlicensed and 18 years old.

The concrete building housed some 40–45 girls aged 8–16, who were taking a summer vacation Koran course that had not been approved by the Diyanet, the Turkish state directorate of religion. The Turkish Daily News reports that the building was last inspected on May 29. Official reports show no mention that a girls’ Koranic course was being held there, yet residents of Balcilar were aware that religious instruction was occurring.

Mehmet Demirgül, Balcilar’s mayor, originally pointed to a gas canister explosion as the cause of the building collapse but later told the press that a leaking gas pipe set off the blast.

Merve Avci, one of the surviving students, told Turkish state wire service Anatolian News Agency that she and her teachers heard “a strange sound” before dawn prayers. After seeing a loose gas pipe, Avci was instructed to close the door and she returned to her room. Not much later, she saw flames shoot up from the basement.

Shoddy construction has been blamed for the collapse of at least four high-density residences over the past five years in the country—a problem exacerbated by Turkey’s extreme earthquake risk. Last year, two apartment buildings crashed in Istanbul; two people were killed in the first collapse. In 2003, 83 children died in the southeastern city of Bingöl when their dorm caved in. The following year, in Konya—the same province where the girls’ dorm collapsed Friday—92 people died in the crash of an 11-story apartment tower.

Some 70 percent of buildings in Turkey are unlicensed, meaning they did not get approval on their building code. Polat Gülkan, the director of Middle Eastern Technical University’s Disaster Management Center, told the Turkish Daily News in September 1999 about the building approval process in the country. “The body that creates the codes and the Development Law is the Ministry of Housing and Public Works. … The implementation of these codes and regulations is not the responsibility of this ministry but of the local governments, and the local governments are not responsible to the ministry. … That’s the primary reason why codes are enforced in a shoddy way.”

“Will it make a difference if I cry? This is fate,” said Göktas, one of the three detained. One of his 11 daughters died in the collapse and another was injured. The majority party, the Islamist-leaning AKP, “sponsored a law in 2005 that allowed owners of unlicensed schools to face the penalty of a fine rather than a prison term,” reports the Turkish Daily News. “The new AKP law also lifted a provision to shut down any Koran courses run without authorization.” As per state rules, students must be at least 12 years old to take a Koran course, but some of the girls in the dorm were younger. “I heard that the course (Boğaziçi) belonged to Soleymanists (a religious order). I did not enter there lest people think I am inspecting it,” said Mehmet Ak, a local representative of the State Religious Directorate.

Konya is Turkey’s unofficial piety capital. The final resting place of famed Sufi mystic Rumi, the central Anatolian city is devoutly Muslim in character and is considered by many Turks as the country’s most conservative town.

The evening of April 26, 2007, a six-story apartment building collapsed in Istanbul’s Sirinevler district. Elderly women were seen sifting through the rubble in their bare hands. In February the same year, a five-story building collapsed in another Istanbul neighborhood. Two people were killed and another 26 were injured.

In September 1999, about a month after a 7.4-magnitude earthquake razed much of Izmit, one of Turkey’s largest cities, the Turkish Daily News took at look at the reasons behind the large amount of what the paper terms “substandard housing.” Rapid urban expansion, placing oversight with developers rather than with local governmental bodies and the political weight that developers carry all play into shoddy construction. “Maybe because of the bureaucracy and other technical reasons the planning process is always behind the demand,” said Abdi Guzer, an associate professor of architecture at Ankara’s Middle Eastern Technical University. “You have the money, you have the technology, but you don’t have planned land.”

The Diyanet, the governmental body charged with funding and running Turkey’s mosques and religious instruction, also known as the Directorate of Religious Affairs, has asked a team of scholars to update portions of the Hadith, Islam’s second-most sacred text after the Koran.